Accessibility

Accessibility

Accessibility policy We are committed to making this services
accessible to everyone, including those who use assistive
technologies to access the internet.

We have designed this website to adhere to web standards and
accessibility criteria. If you have any problems or comments with
the website please contact us.

Web standards This site is built in XHTML 1.0 Strict. All pages should
validate against the relevant document type declaration using the
World Wide Web (W3C) validator.

Accessibility standards We aim to provide web content that conforms to level AA
of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines. All the pages on this site were tested
before being published. If you think we are not achieving these
standards, please contact us and tell us the URL of the page and
any problems you have found. We will do our best to fix them.

This site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for visual
presentation and avoids the use of tables. Tables are used solely
for tabular data.

Some of our CSS styles are not specified in the CSS 2.1
specification, but are specified in CSS3 as it currently stands.
Browsers which do not support these rules should simply ignore
them.

Where possible, purely decorative images are called from CSS. If
they are referenced using the <img> element they have been
given a null alt attribute (alt="").

All content and functionality on the site is available without
JavaScript. Form validation is performed by the server.

Testing All the pages on this site were subject to the following
tests before publication:Link Text is present.
Text is left aligned.
Text equivalent exists for every non-text element.
Write valid HTML/XHTML.

No style information included in HTML. Style is applied from a
stylesheet.
Correct use of HTML heading tags to convey structure.
Lists and list items are marked up properly.
Quotations are marked up properly

Specify the expansion of each abbreviation or acronym where it
first occurs on the page/document, ensuring HTML elements are used
properly here.

Don't use table for layout unless it is for tabular data and
will make sense when linearised.

Organise content so it can still be read without a CSS
stylesheet.
Confirm page is still usable when scripts are turned off.

Ensure that any input handlers are device and client
independent. Specify logical event handlers rather than device
dependant event handlers.

Logical tab order is implemented throughout the
document/tool.
Avoid deprecated HTML elements.
Associate labels explicitly with their controls.

Documents Some legacy documents available for download do not meet
the criteria specified in WCAG 2.0 for non-(X)HTML document
conformance. Where practical, we have provided HTML equivalents of
these documents.

From April 2008, all non-(X)HTML documents available from this
site should meet the standards of WCAG 2.0. We will continue to
provide XHTML equivalents where practical.

We will convert any document that a user finds inaccessible to a
format that they can use. Contact us to request a document in an
alternative format.